


Mr. Moriarty Presents...

by orphan_account



Category: Psych, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Lonely!Jim, M/M, Multi, Other, kid!Jim, psychlock - Freeform, sensitive!Jim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 10:05:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jim Moriarty was a little boy, he was constantly picked on and laughed at. That is, until he met the man that changed his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. Moriarty Presents...

**Author's Note:**

> NOT MY PROMPT! the prompt comes from this post by assortedheadcanons on tumblr:  
> /post/28932372637/when-jim-moriarty-was-a-little-boy-he-was-constantly  
> but anyway. i like sad jim. this is sad jim.

**_CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, YIN AND YANG_  
Santa Barbara psychic brings killers to justice after 15 years**

_ By Johnathan Fischer _   
Staff Writer, California Gazette   
john.athan@fischer.com

 

_Shawn Spencer, psychic consultant with the Santa Barbara Police Department, is the man we all have to thank for bringing the 15-year-long nightmare of the Yin Yang killers to an end. In fact, before Mr. Spencer arrived on the scene, the police and the public weren't even aware that the infamous Yang was working in tandem with another man - her own father._

➣➣➣

Moriarty folds the newspaper in his lap, not even bothering to finish the article. _Idiots_ , he thinks. How could no one else have figured out that there was a Yin to his old friend's Yang? As Yin had told him all those years ago, and as he had repeated to himself and others countless times since: _never_ get your hands dirty.

This Shawn Spencer had figured it out, though. He doesn't sound _quite_ as obvious as his uniformed counterparts, although a proper genius would have closed the Yin-Yang case far quicker than he had. Still, even Moriarty could appreciate someone who is of mildly above-average intelligence. He remembers that Yang had had a bit of a fascination with this exact boy - perhaps it was his dull, consummate American family, or perhaps she saw an intellect in him that one so rarely encounters these days.

But it doesn't matter, Jim decides. Mr. Spencer, however dear he may have been to Yang, had caused the death of his dear friend Mr. Yin and the institutionalization of Mr. Yang. That serious of an offense against Jim Moriarty simply does not go unpunished. 

Jim texts Moran: _Get me to Santa Barbara. JM_

He would have to pay Mr. Shawn Spencer a little visit. And any wit that the fake psychic may possess doesn't matter to Moriarty, he decides. It didn't matter at all.

➣➣➣

The Rotmensens didn't come back to Ireland after those short few months, but Jim continued to contact his friends via letters and, later, phones, emails, and texts.

After Jim moved to London many years later, they still wrote each other. Well, Jim wrote. Yin never really wrote back. Sometimes he'd receive a text or an email from Yang, telling him he was a good boy and that her father was just busy. Jim knew that it was a lie, that Yin didn't _want_ to write him back. Perhaps he found it too sentimental, writing letters to the precocious young boy he had met on a summer vacation in Ireland decades ago. But Jim wasn't a boy anymore, he was a man. He wondered why Yang still addressed him as "Jimmy boy." He wondered why Yin didn't see that he could be a man. 

The contact from Mr. Yang grew more and more sparing as the years passed. Like clockwork, Moriarty continued to write weekly letters to the Rotmensens, detailing the events of his life, the crimes he'd consulted on, boasting his successes in his eagerness to impress his mentors. 

He would never admit to disappointment, week after week when no mail came for him. Some days, he would resolve to never write Yin another letter, another email, another text, not for as long as he lived. But Friday came, week after week, and a letter or an email or a text was sent out from Jim Moriarty, addressed to Professor Karl Rotmensen - Mr. Yin.

He received a letter from Yang once that read:

_Hi Jimmy!_

_Wow, Daddy and me sure are glad to hear that you're so successful over there in Britain! Sounds like you've really taken all our advice to heart. _

_You know we love hearing your stories, but unfortunately Daddy and me have been particularly busy lately and haven't had a whole lot of time to read all your messages to us. _

_Daddy has told me to tell you that you shouldn't bother to write us letters and emails anymore, because we just won't have time to read about all your adventures, and we wouldn't want to put you to any unnecessary trouble._

_Keep up the good work with your consulting criminal business, though! Sounds just brilliant!_

_Kisses,  
YANG_

Moriarty spent the rest of the night correcting all of Yang's mistakes in red pen, and then he went over the entire paper in permanent marker, blacking out every word so he would never have to read it again.

➣➣➣

At the pool that day, just a month after Yin's death, Moriarty slips, just a little bit.

In a particularly _obvious_ effort to make Jim Moriarty feel pity, or remorse, or _something_ , Sherlock Holmes reminds him that "people have died."

Hidden wounds still raw, Moriarty loses control, just a little bit.

"That's what people DO!"

He hopes, he prays that Sherlock will think nothing of it. He hopes that the detective chalks up his outburst to mere unbridled insanity. He prays he isn't found out.

Moriarty goes home later that same night and breaks a plate over his chest. The shattered porcelain cuts him, the blood runs down. Like the disappointment, he would never admit to the pain.

Jim Moriarty doesn't feel anything other than boredom. And he will never, ever tell anyone differently. 

➣➣➣

Moriarty remembers the day before the Rotmensens departed to California. It was the fifth of September, it was raining outside, and it was a Tuesday. They had been in Dublin since the sixteenth of May (also a Tuesday), though Jim had not met them until the Friday after. 

Jim spent the day before his older friends left him lounging in their hotel room, lamenting the fact that all excitement and intelligence in his life would be gone when they left. Yang reminded him of everything that they had taught him, and told him he wouldn't have to be bored if he just took all their advice to heart.

"At least you don't have to deal with the Powers boy anymore," Yin commented, his voice as cold and impassive as ever.

Yang stroked Jim's messy black hair and quietly said, "He'll never laugh at you again, Jimmy boy."

"But the rest of them, they'll still laugh at me," he moaned. "And they're positively _boring_."

"Then you'll have to find a way to stop them laughing. I know you can," Yin assured him.

When the Rotmensens were packing the last of their luggage into their rental car, the thirteen-year-old wrapped his skinny arms around Yin in a gesture of sentiment he had never shown anyone - not even his own father as a child.

"I don't want you to go, Mr. Yin. You're the least boring person I've ever met."

Yin shoved the boy off, hard, and gruffly replied: "Goodbye, Jimmy boy."

He watched them drive off. 

➣➣➣

"Freak!" "Loser!" "Creep!"

"You really haven't got any friends at all, have you?"

"Honestly, how do you even get out of bed in the morning, knowing nobody loves you?"

"Jim, you're the kind of kid that only a mother could love." "And I'll bet even your mother hates you."

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Faggot!" "Psycho!" "Freak!"

The day Jim Moriarty decided that Carl Powers needed to go was the day that Powers cornered him in the locker room and gave him a bloody nose. It was also the night that Jim's father gave him a bloody eye for coming home late, but that afternoon, he'd just _had_ to pay a visit to the Rotmensens' hotel room for a little of their advice.

Yang fawned over him, first attending to his nose before demanding to know what happened. He watched the murderous rage grow in her eyes as he described the day-to-day horror that was Carl Powers, and as he embellished the narrative of that day's events just a little bit.

"That little _cocksucker_!" she cried, her language rewarded with a sharp slap from her father. Unfazed, she continued. "Oh, what I'd give to have my hands around his arrogant little throat right now. How _dare_ he hurt our dearest little Jimmy boy!"

"Yang, don't be stupid. You know strangulation is too risky. Jim, can't you just be a man and suck it up?"

Jim bristled momentarily before Yang's hands were on him again.

"Sounds like Daddy's had enough now," she murmured quietly to Jim. Then, louder: "Come on, Daddy, don't be mean to him. He came here for our help, and that's what we're gonna give him." She stroked the young boy's face, acne-marred and spotted with early stubble, but boyish in expression and earnestness. "There's nothing wrong with you, Jimmy. _He's_ the freak, _he's_ the faggot. We're gonna help you. We're gonna fix it for you."

That was late June, 1989. Carl Powers died just days later, on a school trip. Jim Moriarty waltzed into school that autumn, holding his head just a little bit higher.

Carl Powers would never laugh at him again.

➣➣➣

Moriarty was thirteen the year that the Rotmensens came and went from his life. He spends every day afterward trying to live up to their expectations, trying to become the best he could be. He wants to be the smartest man in the room (though that had never been a challenge), he wants to have the best disguises, he wants to be the best criminal and the most powerful man that the world had ever seen.

The most important things he had learned from Mr. Yin were these: _never get your own hands dirty, never get caught (obviously), and never - ever - get sentimental._

So he makes himself a consulting criminal, a jack-of-all-crimes who works with smugglers, murderers, terrorists, but is never himself a smuggler, murderer, or terrorist.

So he makes himself disappear; he makes himself Richard Brook, a soft-spoken Irish heartthrob living in London; he makes himself never get caught unless it was on _his_ terms. 

So he never allows himself to get close to his clients or assistants - not even Sebastian Moran, tempted as he may occasionally be. But he never could remove himself completely from the positively human realm of emotion and sentiment; his letters were proof enough of that.

But like the disappointment, and the pain, Jim never admits to the sentiment he feels for the manic woman and the cold, cruel (now dead) man he met all those years ago, who told him he was special, who told him he was smart, who told him he wasn't wrong.

Jim Moriarty doesn't feel anything other than boredom. And he will convince everyone of this, and maybe one day, he will even convince himself.

➣➣➣

They probably would have found Jim's dead body sometime in May of 1989 if he hadn't been so much of a smart-arse. But his surly, cantankerous deductions that he carried out in the passenger seat of a black rental car caught his kidnapper's attention and even her admiration. (Jim would determine much later than he felt comfortable admitting that she probably only liked him because he reminded her of Shawn Spencer.)

(Kidnapping, as Mr. Yin and Mr. Yang later told him, was their favorite family pastime.)

Yang chose him because he looked lonely, walking home in the rain like that all alone, head down, shoulders slumped, bitter look on his otherwise youthful face. She called the payphone nearest to him and instructed him to get in the cab. He complied. 

The kidnapper had a bit of a fetish for young boys - a fact he informed her of when they two were making the drive back to the local Best Western. That made her laugh, and she informed him that it was true, and she liked _him_.

"You're sick," Jim replied.

That made her laugh, too. "If you think _I'm_ sick, you ain't seen nothing yet."

He let that one go, with some effort. "What's your name, then?"

"Uh... Yang."

"Is that your real name?"

She laughed again. "No."

"I'm Jim."

"Yes," she said. "I know."

He let that one go, too. "Any point in asking where I'm going?"

Yang smiled at him, almost affectionately. "None at all, _Jim_."

"...Okay." Odd as it was, the feeling that was blooming in his stomach was not fear, anxiety, hatred, anger, or anything that he should have been feeling upon being kidnapped. No, the feeling that was blooming in his stomach was a rare flicker of palpable excitement. Pleasure. Enjoyment. _Not bored now._

➣➣➣

Mr. Yang (Mr. was what they called her in the American presses, the morons not even intelligent enough to guess her _gender_ ) was chatty, manic, tactile, and American - four traits Jim typically found repulsive in human beings. But she was also intelligent and snarky - two traits he typically found admirable in human beings - and, even aside from that, she liked him. She liked _him_ , Jim Moriarty. And, for the first time in his life, Jim found he actually liked her. 

He _liked_ her, despite the fact that she had already taken the liberty of nicknaming him "Jimmy boy," and the fact that, well, she had kidnapped him.

Jim found himself distastefully eager to meet her companion: her father. Her assurance that he was even sicker than she was made him curious to meet this man, to see what made him so sick, so strange. He wondered if he was as intelligent, snarky, chatty, manic, tactile, and American as his partner, Yang, was. 

Jim wondered if he would like the man. He wondered if the man would like him.

➣➣➣

He found, of course, that Yin could not have been more different from Yang. The two really were as contrarily complementary as their namesake. Where Yang was talkative, Yin was near silent. Where Yang was frenzied and wild, Yin was controlled, almost repressed. And where Yang had outbursts of passion, where Yang had obsessive emotion, Yin was as cold and black as stone.

Jim had always been impressed by Yin's piercing frigidity. He himself was much the same way; a story that his father often told him when the man was feeling exceptionally disappointed in his son was that after Jim was born, the doctors handed him to his mother to be held and he smacked her in the eyeball with as much strength as his newborn body could muster.

His mother died the next day, so the infant Jim had to direct his inborn rage towards his father. When he was two, he spilled his craft glue all over his father's work papers; that earned him his first act of violence from his father. In the fourteen years following, it was a seesaw of antagonism between them, sometimes initiated by Jim, sometimes initiated by Gerald Moriarty. Gerald's acts were always of outright violence; punching, kicking, tripping, beating, slapping, and even strangling the boy. Jim's, however, were more insidious, and he always made sure that there was little or no evidence that it was, in fact, him who perpetrated the offenses. But Gerald Moriarty knew his son well enough to know when it was him, even if he couldn't prove it.

Their cat-and-mouse game didn't relent until Jim was sixteen years of age. That winter, his father went on a business trip to Sacramento, California, and promptly drank himself to death in the privacy of his Hampton Inn hotel room. 

The letter that Jim wrote to Yin and Yang that week asked them if they had had anything to do with his father's death.

_If you did_ , he wrote, _I shall have to thank you._

He never received a reply to that particular letter.

➣➣➣

When Jim tried to thank Mr. Yin for the murder of little Carl Powers, Yin laughed at him. 

"If I didn't know you any better, Jimmy, I'd say you were getting sentimental on us. Thanking me? _Please_."

Jim Moriarty continued trying to thank him, day after day when he visited Yin and Yang in their hotel room, year after year when he wrote them his letters. Yin never accepted thanks.

➣➣➣

The day that Moriarty decides to burn the heart out of Sherlock is the day he sees the consulting detective at Angelo's with John. They are talking, laughing, having a good time. Jim goes home that day and resolves to do horrible things to John Watson and Sherlock Holmes. He had thought that Sherlock was as much of a cold bastard as he was; but it was almost as if Sherlock was getting _sentimental_ on him. Either way, Moriarty decides he has to show the stupid man that nothing - _nothing_ \- good comes of feeling, of caring, of loving.

➣➣➣

"Oh, you're just going to _love_ my father," Yang gushed as she led the thirteen-year-old to room 315. Her hand was gentle on the small of his back, a little too low to be considered decent between a 27-year-old woman and a 13-year-old boy. She opened the door to a completely dark room, shoved him in roughly, and then closed and barricaded the hotel room door behind her. 

Jim almost screamed for help - this was fast getting dull - but a low voice interrupted this thought.

"Hello, Jim. Yang has told me all about you. She says you're the cutest kid since Shawn Spencer. Sounds like I need to have another chat with my daughter about her tendencies toward pedophilia, but that's beside the point. I suppose there's no going back now, since you're already with us. Well, come on then, come over here."

With a rare touch of timidity in his stride, Jim took several steps forward, coming into the main part of the room. (Absently, he noticed that there was only one bed in the room. This family was even more fucked up than his was.) He saw a tall, thin figure sitting in an armchair in the corner of the still dark room, watching him. 

There was a silence that lasted about ten seconds, before the man in the chair barked at him: "You can talk, Jimmy boy, go ahead!"

Later, he would curse himself for stuttering at this moment. "Wh-who are y-you?" he asked.

The man paused a moment before getting up out of his chair, walking slowly, purposefully towards him, and taking Jim Moriarty's face in hand.

"Some call me Mr. Yin."


End file.
